Helping each other write better science

Hi everyone I am back ! According to wordpress my last post was 3 months ago !!! That is way to long without writing, this new semester has been really crazy for me and it has taking me a while to be able to breathe and put my thoughts in order. But when I sat down to write this new blogpost I realized something. As many of you know I am a Ph.D. student in Learning Sciences and Educational Policy (I should probably write about that someday) and as a Ph.D. in social sciences I am expected to write A LOT. My final assignments tend to be about 20 pages long as well as the academic papers we write. Turns out ever since I stopped writing for the blog I have had a really hard time writing for work purposes. And that sort of makes sense. Writing for this blog forced me to write and think about how to write a little bit everyday and that kept my writing muscles fit. By not doing that I sort of broke with the writing habit and now I am having trouble even writing these sentences. So let’s fix that !

1. Community Writing Log

First of all I am creating a Writing log and sharing it with all of you:

You can also click here to open it in google docs. One of the tabs has my name and sharing it with all you wonderful readers I am making myself accountable to you. So can click on that link every day and see if I am writing at least 10 minutes everyday. Also all of you can leave me notes to keep me motivated. Finally, I left a tab named “template” so if you are up to this challenge you can duplicate that tab in the same spreadsheet and start a writing log. Just as you will be able to read mine I will be able to read yours. So in joining this challenge you are accepting to become accountable to anyone reading the log. I am hoping this way all of us feel more motivated towards writing the same way one feels motivated to do exercise when one has an exercise buddy.

2. Poke holes into my argument

In my next post I will share thoughts on a new paper I have been working on. However my argument is still on the rough stages and I need to figure out how to improve it. . So I thought it would be cool to show to you readers the argument I have so far so you can poke holes at it and force me to improve it. I know that is a little unorthodox but I think it can be an interesting exercise on how these platforms help connect academics with different backgrounds and knowledge together. This post will be published by Thursday next week.

3. Writing at least one post a month

Back in August I was a guest at the Collapsed Wavefunction podcast and I want to elaborate more on the topic of this podcast (You will need to listen to it to know what topic this is about). So I am promising to writing another post by November 30th the latest in my new goal to publish at least one blogpost a month. By sharing the topic beforehand I am not only making myself more accountable but also will force me to improve my arguments in this topic.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the community writing log challenge!